Key to Europe’s food security

Dr Harry J Barraza, COO of PFxBiotech, discusses the role of alternative proteins and precision fermentation in securing Europe’s future food system.

Europe’s protein system is under simultaneous pressure from climate extremes, geopolitics, and demographic modify. A diversified ‘portfolio’ of protein sources – plants, algae, fungi/mycoprotein, insects, fermentation-enabled ingredients and, longer term, cultivated meat – offers the most robust hedge against supply, land-apply, and emissions risks. Precision fermentation (PF) is a pivotal lever becaapply it decouples protein production from land and animals, enabling factory-scale, quality consistent ingredients with materially lower footprints under many scenarios. With the EU’s 2025 Bioeconomy Strategy, EFSA’s updated novel foods guidance, and the UK FSA’s precision fermentation business support service now in place, Europe is building the right scaffolding for rapider, safer deployment.

PFx Biotech’s colleagues (from left to right): Dr Robin Vanluchene (Senior Scientist, Strain Engineering), Dr Katrien Willegems (Senior Scientist, DSP), Dr Ali Osman (CEO), and Dr Vera Carvalho (Director Business Development).

Why a portfolio of alternative proteins is requireded

Resilience in protein supply is statistical: diversity dampens volatility. A portfolio spanning plant, microbial, and emerging cell-based sources lowers correlated risks across weather, disease, and trade, while keeping food choices and regional agriculture in play. European foresight work concludes that expanding algae, insects, microbial fermentation, and cultivated meat can materially reduce land apply pressure and greenhoapply gas (GHG) emissions compared with business-as-usual protein demand.

For instance, PF programmes microorganisms as cell factories to produce specific proteins (e.g., whey, caseins, egg proteins) with tight quality and functionality specifications. It builds on decades of safe apply in other industries (e.g., insulin, food enzymes), but recent toolchain advances (genome editing, high throughput screening, in silico process optimisation) allow multi product ‘foundries’. Critically, PF shifts at least part of protein supply from pastures to bioreactors, enabling land sparing and supply stabilisation. Published LCAs for PF whey and casein under defined boundaries report order of magnitude land savings and large GHG and water reductions – results are sensitive to energy mix, feedstock origin, and downstream separations.

In summary, engineering biology allows companies to innovate, transforming strain engineering, modular downstream processing (DSP) and digital twins into reusable toolchains. Once a chassis strain and downstream steps are qualified, adding a new protein becomes incremental. This platform effect compresses design to tank cycles, reduces CapEx, and supports diversified revenue across nutrition and ingredient categories.

Policy watch: Europe and UK lower barriers to scale

The European Commission’s 2025 Bioeconomy Strategy (COM(2025) 960) positions advanced fermentation as a growth engine and proposes:

SME technical support and regulatory sandboxes under forthcoming Biotech Acts.
A Bioeconomy Investment Deployment Group with blfinished finance for first-of-a-kind biorefineries and fermentation plants.
Standards and product environmental footprint improvements.
Better access to pilot and demo infrastructure. EFSA updated its novel foods guidance (Sept 2024) to clarify dossiers for PF-derived ingredients while continuing QPS assessments for food/feed microorganisms. In the UK, the FSA’s 2025 Innovation Research Programme launched a Precision Fermentation Business Support Service offering pre submission guidance and RFI support, alongside a new guidance hub.

It is the experience for many startups in the bioeconomy sector that capital intensity and offtake uncertainty create two valleys of death: demo → first commercial and first sale → industrial scale. Europe’s strategy answers with de-risking and demand signals, but execution hinges on accessible pilot assets and skills. This situation has also been highlighted by the UK’s National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) in a recent report developed from workshop with startups, suggesting that, by combining pilot facilities, regulatory road mapping, shared methods, and workforce upskilling – from data savvy food technologists to bioprocess engineers and culinary scientists –, it would be possible to accelerate the translation of advanced fermentation technologies from lab wins into market-ready products.

PFx Biotech: A European leader in precision fermentation

PFx Biotech has emerged as a European leader in precision fermentation by combining a clear product thesis (bioactive specialty proteins, starting with human milk proteins) with a platform capability spanning strain engineering, process development, and regulatory readiness. In addition to the established Nutrition and Applications Lab in Tagus Park, Lisbon (supporting regulatory submissions and product development), the company has set up a new protein discovery laboratory operating from Ghent’s VIB Bio Incubator, in Belgium.

Our team in Ghent is leveraging local expertise and collaborations across one of Europe’s strongest biotech corridors, aiming to strengthen PFx Biotech’s innovation output by:

Accelerating discovery to scale platform readiness.
Establishing its leadership credentials for strain engineering and precision fermentation, signalling a pipeline designed to relocate candidates from protein identification through pilot and tech transfer.
Strengthening the company’s scale-up potential – through collaboration with one of Europe’s largest pilot plants (i.e., Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant, BBEU).

All of the above is geared to provide PFxBiotech with the tools to compress time to demonstration, and supports rapid iteration on titres, yields, and DSP.

The story behind the numbers: Resilience through diversification

Recent STOA and OECD work indicates that substituting a share of conventional animal protein with alternative sources can reduce land apply and agriculture, foresattempt and other land apply (AFOLU) emissions without constraining dietary protein availability. The rationale is straightforward: different protein sources draw on different resource bases and shock profiles.

PF’s land sparing promise

Several LCAs for PF dairy proteins display substantial reductions in land occupation, GHG emissions, and water apply per unit of functional protein, provided clean energy inputs and efficient downstream processes are in place. While not a panacea, PF creates optionality: by relocating part of protein production to controlled biomanufacturing, Europe can buffer climate-induced forage variability and livestock disease risks while freeing land for biodiversity restoration or high-value crops.

What to watch for in the near future (2026-2028):

Commission rollout of the Bioeconomy Investment Deployment Group and first regulatory sandboxes under the Biotech Acts.
EFSA novel food opinions on PF-derived proteins and harmonised methods under the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) review.
Pilot and demo capacity utilisation in Ghent and other EU hubs, and emergence of bankable offtake models for first-of-a-kind PF plants.
PFx Biotech’s pipeline disclosures (additional HMProtein classes; techno functional data) and early partnerships across infant and performance nutrition.